Woofun AI reports that Meituan has restructured its Core Local Commerce division to establish a new AI Transformation unit, placing it on equal footing with its food delivery and flash shopping departments. This strategic pivot is led by Mu Yao, the former general manager of Dianping, who now reports directly to Wang Puzhong, the CEO of Meituan's Core Local Commerce division. The appointment of a seasoned business executive rather than a technical specialist underscores Meituan's pragmatic philosophy of prioritizing the integration of artificial intelligence into its core commercial operations over pure technological experimentation. This organizational shift mirrors recent moves by Alibaba, which established its Token Foundry division, signaling a broader industry trend where major internet conglomerates are elevating AI to a central strategic pillar. Unlike previous iterations where AI initiatives were siloed within technical teams reporting to Li Shubin, the head of Meituan's platform and an S-team member, this new structure ensures that AI deployment is driven by business outcomes and resource allocation efficiency across the entire local commerce ecosystem.

The tangible output of this strategic realignment is already visible in the rapid development and launch of Tabbit 1.0, an AI-native browser created by the GN06 team. Following more than 100 days of public testing and multiple version iterations, Tabbit has garnered significant market attention as the first major product resulting from Meituan's focused AI efforts. The GN06 team itself is a direct result of Meituan's acquisition of the "Guangnian Zhiwai" team for 2.065 billion yuan, integrating their expertise into a dedicated unit focused on AI-native applications. The timeline for Tabbit's development was aggressive; development commenced in September 2025, with the first version released in November. After undergoing internal testing at Meituan in December, the product entered public testing immediately following the Spring Festival. Despite facing allegations of plagiarism during its rapid launch in China, the team quickly pivoted to release an international version, demonstrating the unit's agility. Beyond Tabbit, the GN06 team, which consists of dozens of personnel, has also launched AI image and video generation tools such as Miaoshua in late 2023 and the AI emotional companionship application "WOW" in late 2024. In November 2025, the former head of Guangnian Zhiwai's application team was transferred to Meituan to report directly to Li Shubin, further consolidating the company's talent pool for entertainment and agent-related AI applications.

Woofun AI data shows that Meituan's investment in AI infrastructure is substantial, with CEO Wang Puzhong publicly confirming an annual investment exceeding 10 billion yuan. This capital expenditure has been directed primarily toward the development of the self-developed LongCat large model series, which was initially released in September 2025. The LongCat series currently encompasses 12 distinct models covering text, image, voice, and video modalities, positioning Meituan among the top domestic companies in large model development, second only to major cloud computing giants. To support this ambitious technical roadmap, Meituan has aggressively recruited top-tier talent to address skill gaps. At the end of 2025, Pan Xin, a former partner at FlashAI and the former head of ByteDance's visual large-model AI platform, joined the company to lead multi-modal AI innovation and the development of applications like the LongCat App.

Additionally, Pei Peng, who oversees the basic models for the LongCat team, has been active in academic forums throughout 2025. These efforts have yielded a diverse portfolio of B2B and B2C products, including 'Kangaroo Advisor' and 'Smart Shopkeeper' for merchants, alongside independent AI lifestyle assistants like 'Xiaomei' and the AI butler 'Wen Xiaotuan.' Prior to the May Day holiday this year, 'Wen Xiaotuan' was strategically positioned in a prominent location within the navigation bar at the bottom of the Meituan App home page, signaling its importance within the Core Local Commerce system.

The organizational culture at Meituan is undergoing a profound transformation to align with these technological advancements. According to reports from Huxiu, a mid-level technical employee noted that since the beginning of 2026, the company has been executing a thorough "AI transformation" across its operations. In his specific business unit, over 95% of coding work now relies on Meituan's self-developed CatPaw tool, which has become an indispensable component of daily workflows. For 2026, Meituan has explicitly set "improving human efficiency through AI' as a key corporate goal. This initiative aims to reduce the proportion of manual labor in repetitive tasks, extending beyond traditional code generation to include the deployment of drones and unmanned delivery vehicles to enhance efficiency in complex logistical scenarios. By reorganizing business processes based on AI capabilities and optimizing them to eliminate internal inefficiencies, Meituan is cultivating an organizational culture that is fully compatible with the AI ecosystem and optimized for rapid process execution. This cultural shift is critical as the company moves from viewing AI as a technical exploration to treating it as a fundamental operational necessity.

Despite these internal strides, Meituan's AI business maintains a relatively low external profile compared to competitors with larger traffic volumes and more aggressive marketing strategies. For instance, the independent AI lifestyle assistant 'Xiaomei' has recorded only 1.69 million downloads on the Android platform to date.

However, Meituan is actively redefining its role in the AI era by shifting from competing for the "super entrance" to becoming a "service foundation" that all AI assistants must rely on. During the Q1 earnings call, CEO Wang Xing announced an upcoming collaboration between Meituan's "Xiaomei" and Tencent's Yuanbao. This integration will allow users to input local service requests directly into Yuanbao, triggering "Xiaomei" to execute orders from Meituan without requiring users to switch applications. This approach contrasts sharply with Alibaba's "Qianwen" model, which completes the entire ordering process within its own closed system. Meituan's strategy is to open its fulfillment capabilities to all AI assistants, ensuring that regardless of whether users interact with Yuanbao, Doubao, or other platforms, the final delivery and offline services are executed by Meituan's merchant network and delivery workforce. Wang Xing illustrated this logic with a vivid analogy: "Even if Einstein were to be my secretary and asked to book a restaurant, he wouldn't know whether there are any seats available. This is not a matter of intelligence but of information access."

This 'step-back' strategy is further operationalized through Meituan's "Physical AI" vision, which leverages its unique data and fulfillment advantages across over 2,800 cities and counties where tens of millions of transactions occur daily. During the Q1 2026 earnings call, Wang Xing outlined a new strategic direction: serving AI assistants as a distinct customer segment alongside consumers and merchants. To facilitate this, Meituan released the "Run errands Skill" in May, a packaged capability that allows AI assistants to place errand orders directly. Multiple AI assistants have already integrated this feature, validating the demand for Meituan's backend infrastructure. The scope of "Physical AI" is further expanded by Meituan's drone business, which occupies a strategic position in the low-altitude economy. This business unit, which has been a focus since 2017 when Mao Yining and his team joined, grew to over 300 members by September 2022, many of whom are leaders in artificial intelligence and hardware. In February 2024, Wang Xing explicitly elevated the reporting relationship for drone and overseas businesses to report directly to him, prioritizing technology and international operations. This vertical integration allows Meituan to extend its "Physical AI" services from the ground to the air, creating a comprehensive service layer that purely digital AI models cannot replicate.

Meituan's approach to AI investment and product development reflects a distinct corporate DNA that prioritizes practical application over theoretical supremacy. While companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent invest hundreds of billions in AI, Meituan's scale is smaller, yet its focus remains intensely practical. The LongCat team rarely makes public appearances, and there is no single clear technical leader in charge, contrasting with the high-profile marketing of competitors like Qianwen. Instead of relying solely on self-developed models, Meituan's products, such as the Tabbit browser, integrate multiple leading large models including LongCat-Flash-Chat, DeepSeek, Doubao, Qianwen, and Kimi. The company's primary metric for success is not the inherent strength of a specific model but its ability to produce effective results within Meituan's specific application scenarios. This is evident in the LongCat product interface, where navigation options such as 'Find nearby entertainment,' 'Create a travel plan,' and 'Book a place to stay' are prominently displayed, continuing the tradition of placing business needs first. Meituan does not aim to become a "token factory" but rather to serve as the critical infrastructure connecting digital intelligence with real-world services. As the AI era evolves, Meituan's future competitiveness will depend on how deeply it can integrate its scenario understanding and fulfillment capabilities with the broader AI ecosystem, maintaining control over the assets that define its core value proposition in the local life services sector.